Sunhat, a German startup empowering sustainability teams by scaling their responses to sustainability questionnaires, ESG ratings, and reporting checklists, expanded its seed round to €5 million through fresh capital from EnBW New Ventures and existing investors Capnamic Ventures, WEPA Ventures, and xdeck ventures.
Its seed financing was announced in May 2023, and now with the automation software already being used cross-industry by suppliers, retailers, manufacturing brands, and publicly traded corporations, Sunhat is investing the new capital to support its rapid growth with further technological development and expansion of the sales and tech teams.
“The transformation to more sustainability is at risk of failing before it has even begun. Sunhat aims to drive the transformation by automating processes with AI-powered technology and significantly increasing the productivity of companies in meeting diverse requirements,” said Lukas Vogt, Co-Founder and CEO at Sunhat.
Companies are increasingly pressured to provide critical sustainability data for reporting, ratings, and customer inquiries, with demands rising for both qualitative and quantitative data.
“With 11,700 companies currently affected by reporting obligations, the number of indirectly affected suppliers and partners is already significantly higher. Eventually, all companies will be required to disclose their ESG data. With increasing requirements, a central system for the accurate transmission of this data is crucial,” commented Pascal Beckers, Principal at EnBW New Ventures.
Sunhat offers companies a flexible platform to map the multitude of sustainability requests, manage associated projects, and fulfill necessary tasks. Sunhat focuses on making the existing data dynamically usable for different needs, establishing the software solution as a crucial tool for users.
Every incoming request in Sunhat is synchronized in real-time for all users and can be processed immediately. Using AI, the system understands complex sustainability requirements, matches them with existing quantitative and qualitative data points, and assists experts in generating answers in seconds.